1. The article only
concerns assertion with respect to its speech act properties. The
topic of the content of assertions is too large to be
covered here. A few other more general topics have also been left
out. However, an
earlier version
of this entry (first published in 2007, last version Winter 2014) was
organized around the relations of assertion to other topics, including
truth and logic, and contained, e.g., discussions of conditional and
hypothetical assertions.

2.
After Lewis 1979 it is
common to treat standards of precision as a factor for
determining truth or falsity relative to a context, rather than as
separate dimension of evaluation.

3. A referee claimed that
the presupposition of (4) can be cancelled as well, as in:

(i)Kepler did not die in misery. Kepler doesn't exist.

My own intuition is that the addition of the second sentence
induces a reinterpretation of the first. But it is possible to
accommodate the opposite intuition by adopting a negative free logic,
i.e., a semantics that treats atomic sentences with non-referring
singular terms as false, and their negations as true. On such a
semantics, the first sentence of (i) is true if the second is. The
presupposition is then merely pragmatic.

4. The example is due a
referee, who also claims that the embedded content is
asserted in this case.

5. In some later
developments of the theory of generalized conversational implicatures,
especially in Levinson (2000), some
generalized implicatures are not really indirectly conveyed, but
contribute to what is said, for instance (directly)
asserted. Thereby it competes with Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson 1995), the theory of
implicitures (Bach 1994), and
the theory of modulations (Recanati
2004), especially as regards so-called
enrichments. Cf. Pagin
2014.

6. Pagin (2004: 851) suggested a so-called
inferential integration test, in which a sentence proposed as
being used for indirectly asserting that $p$
(e.g., by irony) replaces the corresponding explicit sentence in an
inference. The idea is that if the intuitive validity of the inference
is preserved, the proposed sentence can be accepted as being used for
an indirect assertion.

7. Some care is
needed to distinguish between what a speaker directly commits herself
to and what she indirectly commits herself to by because of logical
relations. If I assert that $p$ and $q$ is a logical consequence of $p$ (more properly, if this relation holds between
the sentences expressing the propositions), then if I commit myself to
$p$ I also, in some indirect normative
sense, commit myself to $q$, but I don't
really assert that $q$ if I am unaware of
the consequence relation. Without a distinction between direct and
indirect commitments, we would either have to require logical
omniscience of asserters, or deny that the speaker in any sense
commits herself to what follows from what she asserts. These issues
have been studied in so-called logics of assertion. Cf. the
supplement
Logic and Assertion,
of the earlier version of the this entry (first published in 2007,
last version in the Winter 2014 archive). It should be added that what goes for
logical consequence also goes for entailment more generally, e.g., in
some cases of presupposition.

8. Selecting the context
of utterance itself as the context of assessment relevant for
assertion avoids an early critical point made by Gareth Evans (1985: 349–50): if it is left open when
to assess an assertion, so that an assertion can be correct at one
time and incorrect later, the speaker aiming at correctness cannot
decide what to say. If the context of assessment is the context of
utterance, then the speaker does know. As a result, however, a
traditional connection between correctness and truth is given up. If
the sentence is a future contingent, the truth value determined at a
later time has no bearing on the correctness of the
utterance. Cf. García-Carpintero 2008;
Greenough 2011;
Marques 2014;
Caso 2014 for further discussion of assertion in connection with
relativism.

9.Lackey (2011), on the other hand, proposes
that justification has two aspects, a quantitative and a
qualitative. The first concerns how much justification the
speaker has, the second the kind of justification it is. She
suggests (2011: 273) that the knowledge
norm may be appropriate for quantity, and appeals to examples of what
she calls “isolated second-hand knowledge” to show that
other parameters than quantity of justification are relevant.